Medici Money: Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

Thus the comment of a contemporary. It was not, then, a return to medieval Christian preaching. The negatives in this description tell us that. There would be no old-style scholastic caviling. But neither would there be pretty quotations from classical authors, nor any reference to authorities outside the word of God. In a society buzzing with too many ideas, a Church cluttered with pricey secular bric-a-brac, Savonarola strips his Christianity down to the bare scriptures, the naked crucifix. “I sense a light within me,” he says. It is Christ, the light of the world. But not, as Ficino would have it, Plato’s light, or Proclus’s, or that of some Orphic hymn. “Oh priests, oh prelates of the Church of Christ,” cries Savonarola, “leave your benefices, which you cannot justly hold, leave your pomp, your splendid feasts and banquets.” He might have been preaching directly to Giovanni de’ Medici. Lorenzo also warned his son not to be corrupted by that “pit of iniquity” that was Rome. But there was no question of abandoning the benefices. Why else did one go into the Church?

The contrast alerts us to a condition essential to the development of international banks of the Medici variety: a certain laxity in the application of religious law, or, better still, a complete separation of church and state. In short, there is an affinity between money and eclecticism. “No man can serve two masters,” says Jesus. But money can serve any number. It is no respecter of principles. Broken up into discreet and neutral units, value flows into any cup, a shower of gold into any coffer, be it in Constantinople, Rome, or Jerusalem. The alum merchant trades with the Turk. The silk manufacturer is happy to sell provocative clothes to the pretty ladies of Florence. The idealist, whether Christian or Muslim, Communist or No-Global, must always be suspicious of money and banking. But the idealist is not to be confused with the ideas man. Quite the contrary. Admirably flexible, the humanist thinkers with their eclectic reading were notorious for finding authorities to justify whatever form of government best suited their paymasters. In 1471, Bartolomeo dedicated his treatise, “On the Prince,” to Federico Gonzaga. In 1475, the same text reappeared as “On the Citizen,” dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici. In the same period, depending upon which patrons were paying him, Francesco Patrizi wrote “On Republican Education” and then “On the Kingdom and Education of Kings.” Both systems were best. Money has a way of being right. Only popular government by the poor is unforgivable.

Savonarola, as portrayed by Fra Bartolomeo. The austere lines and sharp contrasts underline the man’s unswerving devotion and refusal to compromise. Finally, the Medici had met someone who could not be bought.

Spiritual renewal can only come through poverty, Savonarola preached, through an end to the clergy’s collusion with wealth and power. His would not be a church that worked with banks. Largely ignored, the monk left Florence in 1487. Meanwhile, the great political upheavals of his career behind him, Lorenzo was writing poetry again: cycles of love poems, dense with labored references to classical myth but lightened by marvelous landscape description. Busy with his verses, Il Magnifico ignored a proposal from Lorenzo Spinelli, the new director in Lyon, to revive the Medici bank’s old holding structure. Lorenzo himself was one of the bank’s main debtors now, one of the political leaders who would never repay. In 1488, a ban on public festivities in Florence, something that had been in force since the Pazzi conspiracy ten years ago, was finally lifted. Is it a coincidence that Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice, had succumbed to tuberculosis that same summer? Lorenzo was away at the thermal baths when she died. He wrote no poem for her. But for the first celebration of Carnival after a decade’s break, he produced some new Carnival songs, and some moving lyrics about youth. The loves of Bacchus and Ariadne are evoked to remind the adolescents of Florence to seize the day:

Quanto è bella giovinezza,

How fine youth is

che si fugge tutta via

Though it flee away

Chi vuole essere lieto, sia,

Let he who wishes, enjoy

di doman non c’è certezza

Nothing’s certain tomorrow

Stiff in the joints though he now was, Lorenzo practiced what he preached and got on his horse at night to visit Bartolomea de’ Nasi when she was away from her husband in her country villa. “Crazy,” writes Guicciardini, “to think that a man of such reputation and prudence, forty years old, was so taken by a woman, hardly beautiful and full of years, as to do things that would have seemed dishonest to every youngster.”